Madame Psychosis’s show; the HmH (pp. 187–188)

The Incandenza marriage rendered as an institution — you can read the union off the course catalogue. "Like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise," and the proof offered is the school itself: the trivium-and-quadrivium rigor is Avril's, the athletic pragmatism James's and Schtitt's, and E.T.A.'s curriculum is precisely where their competing wills were "ad-valoremized" into a working peace. A marriage whose surviving monument is a negotiated syllabus — its concordances and its compromises legible in which subjects got kept, cut, or bent. (The phrase itself first floats over from Madame Psychosis's broadcast, spoken by the book's great mirror-family figure and then stamped by the narration onto the Incandenzas — the marriage described in a voice from outside the family, as if it too could only be seen from across the river.) The most intimate thing about this couple is externalized into an academic institution; where the marriage was, a school now stands.